Sharif El-Gamal, the leading organizer behind the mosque and community center near Ground Zero, owes $224,270.77 in back property tax on the site, city records show.

El-Gamal’s company, 45 Park Place Partners, failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July, according to the city Finance Department.

The delinquency is a possible violation of El-Gamal’s lease with Con Edison, which owns half of the proposed building site on Park Place. El-Gamal owns the other half but must pay taxes on the entire parcel.

Maybe El-Gamal should take a page from John Kerry by admitting to no wrongdoing, but paying the taxes he owes anyway, and then moving the entire mosque to Nantucket. Let’s put that “religious freedom” thing to a real test by building it on Thurston and Lovey’s front porch.

Some of the ground zero area mosque’s defenders — Pelosi, Obama, Bloomberg, etc. — embrace political philosophies that are the reason the levels of regulation and taxation are higher than a bedbug in Paris Hilton’s “makeup” bag, which increases the likelihood that people will try to dodge them. So it’s a little ironic that those same mosque defenders could in part be the very undoing of the progressive cause célèbre of 2010.

Whatever happens, Sharif El-Gamal has at the very least seemingly qualified himself for a cabinet position in the Obama administration.